I moved to Russia years ago from the US so I can confirm that the experience is worlds better and that many US institutions never really "modernized". When I le

I moved to Russia years ago from the US so I can confirm that the experience is worlds better and that many US institutions never really "modernized". When I left in 2016, I still only had the option to pay my rent with a physical check on my most recent place, and the previous had a "convenience charge" for paying with card, which had to be done in the rental office since their payment site never stayed up. Some of it has gotten better I'm told by friends and colleagues, but for my bank, there's still no built-in money transfer option between the same banks or others, there's a requirement to us some third party service (with a non-trivial transaction fee) Card to Card transfers aren't really a thing, again relying on third party services to do the transfers (at cost). It's not so much that the US can't do good things, but a lot of infrastructure/convenience that the non-US world enjoys is certainly possible, but the way that a lot of the infrastructure is built up and supported simply is because of a preference to offload such services to third party providers that just introduce an extra signup/process/fee. I don't know the full details of payment processing and why it seems like the card to card transfers within the bank app isn't really widely done, or why the confirmation codes for online purchases isn't a thing or even why contactless was such a struggle for the US for so long (when I visited in 2019, I think only at the Apple store did they have a reader that worked with contactless pay...)